Alternate Character Advancement

[hdan]

Experienced players sometimes feel a bit lost when they realize there are no "levels". But once they settle in, they're focused on playing the character rather than the advancement system. It promotes a different style of play that seems to me to fit the overall tone of Traveller better, though that's obviously a matter of personal preference.

I agree - it's one of the things I've always liked about Trav. Your investment in your character can be as much or as little as you like, and new characters are not necessarily worse than old characters.

You can have fantastic games where the Ref just hands out a set of characters at the beginning of the game, and you can have years long campaigns with the same guys from beginning to end. Want to do something a little different for the session? That's ok, just generate a set of characters and go on a one-off adventure. Take "One Crowded Hour" for example - that would probably not be something you'd want to put your primary party through, but would make a fun "one-off" evening. Maybe your primary party can be part of the ending?

In fact, it would be not only possible but easy to run a campaign as a series of loosly-connected short stories, where the results of each "chapter" become news stories or rumors encountered by an entirely new party in the next chapter. The players themselves are the only consistent thread running through the game. That way, you can have a "science" crew, a merc" crew, and a "just rolled them up for this adventure" crew.

Another big advantage of the "Trav Way" is that the Ref can feel free to kill off characters and players can "retire&replace" characters at will without skewing the game's power levels, since the player's new character may be even more powerful than the last. Of course a good Ref wouldn't keep a player waiting too long to get a replacement character, unless the player really deserved it. :wink:

There's no "but we're all Level 32! We can't babysit a 1st Leveler!" effect. In D&D you had to solve that by "force-growing" the new character (thus robbing the player of the opportunity to live a major and enjoyable portion of their character's life) or use magic (the usual solution) to fix the glitch.

These are just a few ideas about how a Trav campaign can be made to play to Trav's strengths and not attempt to turn it into a D20 power-building clone game.

 

[sergeant_x]

Your investment in your character can be as much or as little as you like, and new characters are not necessarily worse than old characters.

It also makes character deaths easier to handle. Losing a character in an advancement game is a pain in the butt because of the sense that you'll have to "start all over again", or that you've lost ground somehow.

I don't like to kill characters wily-nily, but losing a character on occasion can add considerably to the sense of peril a party experiences.

 

[BP]

Games where players play more than one character and losses are common can be quite enjoyable. Even in D&D we used to play this way - with a high level 'patron' for those advanced modules. The patron would pop-in (magically of course) and save the bacon (or resurrect it), but when playing 2-3 characters the patron was only needed when most of the party was annihilated or the obstacle required a higher level (and that player usually had a low level in the game). We could even kill each others characters when the mood struck - without causing RW fights :wink: (of course, that might set off a small Mutually Assured Destruction campaign).

When I started refereeing Traveller, I found it even better geared to this style of play - especially for one-offs. I used NPCs (as we didn't have any 'high-level' players) as intermediaries with Patrons who had a special interest in the characters' survival and success. Every player rolled up 2-3 characters - this worked well for small groups of 2 and 3 players, though I'm not sure if it would play well with larger groups.